


This Tiny, Unregarded Blue World

by orphan_account



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Angels, Biblical Reinterpretation, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-29 20:15:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11448255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: In which Astra was the Angel of the Stars, tossed out of Heaven along with a number of other angels who supported Lucifer's ill-fated rebellion against God.  And of course, because God is a bureaucratic prick, the new angel that is meant to replace her has to kill her in order to assume the position, because he doesn't like loose ends.  And of course, that new angel is Alex.





	This Tiny, Unregarded Blue World

It’s a little-discussed fact that Lucifer was not the only angel tossed out of Heaven after his fall.

The Angel of Death and the Recording Angel were thrown out as well, and other angels were promoted to do their jobs (the two originals found homes in what would eventually become Wisconsin).  The Angels of War and of Love were cast down and ended up in Los Angeles.  Most people don’t know that the city was so named because the first settlers found those two angels there, and dedicated the place to them.  Said angels would eventually pay for their sloppiness with their lives, when the Father sent their replacement angels down to Earth to dispatch them.  (Don’t believe what you hear about the original name of Los Angeles being something long and Spanish about the Queen of the Angels.  It’s all made up, just like half of the Bible itself.)

And then, there was Astra.  

She had been the Angel of the Stars, and her sister had been the Angel of Justice.  Astra struggled for centuries to find a place on Earth; she tried being an astronomer, which worked fine in ancient Persia, but she had a bit of a hard time in Medieval Europe, where they didn’t have much love for learned women or people who knew too much about how the stars worked or who supported a heliocentric model of the universe.  Their efforts to burn her as a witch were complicated by her being fireproof, and further complicated by them all shitting their breeches and running away when she gave up trying to reason with them, and simply spread her enormous black feathered wings.

It was a dark couple of centuries for Astra.

Astra didn’t exactly hate humans, but she resented their obtuseness, their insistence upon worshipping the Father in ways that he would never have wanted.  She resented that he loved them more than he loved her, and those other servants of his who had been cast down.  Humans were small, and fragile, and weak of mind.  They wanted to be kept in the dark about the workings of the universe, wanted to be told what to do, and there were too many priests and princes with ambitions to step into the Almighty’s shoes and leverage that to their own advantage.

The rise of America worked out well for her, though.  They grew from a scrappy little collection of ragtag colonies into an odd nation; decadent like Romans, militaristic like Spartans.  But from about the first world war on, there was always a place for a woman like her in the U.S. military.  She eventually ended up in the Air Force, constantly reinventing herself as an enlisted woman, a pilot, a medic, and then, when they finally allowed women to be paratroopers, she took that job.  Jumping out of planes and surrendering her body to the air was a welcome feeling; it was harder these days to find opportunities to spread her actual wings, but she earned a few little silver ones that she could pin to her lapels after successful jumps.

It was getting old, living on Earth.  Not that she wanted to go back to Heaven.  But she formed few attachments here, because what was the point?  Humans would just fade away and go off to Heaven where she couldn’t follow them.  

She could rule them, she supposed.  But then, trying to take over the world was how she’d ended up getting parked down here in the first place.  It wasn’t that she had any less pride now than she did then, but it didn’t seem worth it.  Lucifer had ended up with a kingdom of his own, and granted it was Hell, but still it was his, and he got to punish the wicked.  Astra suspected her own luck would be somewhat less impressive.

So she was a paratrooper, dropping into dangerous places where being fireproof and bulletproof worked out well for her.  She brought a lot of munitions to troops in remote mountain villages in Afghanistan, and killed a lot of warlords in Somalia, and managed to bring a little water to innocent, parched civilians now and then.  It was an alright way to spend her time.  Sometimes she wished she could just unfurl her wings and take out her flaming sword and unleash angelic wrath on the wicked, but she’d managed to stay off of Heaven’s radar all of this time, and she wanted to keep it that way.

But when she could, she’d find a remote part of the desert, or an island in the middle of the sea, where no-one was around, and she could free her wings, and alight someplace high up, and stare at the stars.  She would whisper to them, and they would whisper back, and she would inquire as to their movements and they would talk of the teeming worlds that they dragged in their wakes. 

She had no way of knowing that someone was listening.

One night, she sat on a cliff on an island in the Pacific, looking out at the reflection of the stars on the mirror-smooth ocean.  She could hear the songs of the galaxies, even here, on this tiny, unregarded blue world.  She had spent some moments speaking with them, and now she sat and watched and listened, her wings curled around herself, shielding herself from the breezes off the water, which were unusually strong for such a mild evening. 

The well of her loneliness felt particularly deep tonight.

The stirring of the air continued, tugging at the large primary feathers of her wings.  It seemed, actually, to pick up, and after a moment, Astra uneasily stood, because something was awry.  A stone had dropped into the middle of her well of loneliness.  An angelic presence, after thousands of years on earth.  And it was nearby.

She scanned the horizon, and then turned to look toward the thick jungle that ringed the base of the hill leading up to the cliff.  She peered into its depths, but only saw darkness.  She tilted her head and listened.

“You are foolish to continue speaking to the stars,” came a voice that reverberated in the air, from everywhere at once.

It was not the Father.  She knew that much.  But clearly, she thought, she had been found by someone.  She shrugged her shoulders and unfurled her wings to their full breadth.  If this was finally her time, she would strike as formidable a figure as possible.

She turned back toward the water, and saw her, approaching through the air, banking around to her from the eastern side of the island:  a bronze-armored, white-winged, flaming-sword-wielding angel.  She blazed, a fiery quasar against the night, and Astra thought to herself that this creature was as beautiful as one of the stars she loved.  But she unsheathed her sword, and raised it.  She stood, more still than stone, on the cliff above the water, as the white-winged angel descended upon her in a blaze of white light and a rush of mighty wind that, had Astra been a human, might have knocked her to the ground.  But she was not human, and so she stood, her hair blowing behind her in the rushing air, as the white-winged angel hovered before her.

“You needn’t make such an entrance,” Astra called to her over the wind.  “I’m not a human.  These things don’t impress me.”

The white-winged angel hung suspended there for a few moments more, considering what she’d said.  Then she dipped upwards a little, sailed over Astra, and landed behind her on the grassy part of the outcropping.  The wind and the sound effects settled down, but her white wings still blazed.  Her sword still flamed her hand.  Astra noticed that the angel’s eyes burned too, beneath dark, graceful brows, in a face that Astra thought she might not mind gazing upon for a few centuries, at least.  “So,” Astra said at length.  “Do you have a name?”

“The Father calls me Alexandra.”

“And what do you prefer to be called?”

The angel shifted and kicked at the dirt idly with her toe.  “Alex.”  She looked curiously at Astra for a moment, and then shook her head, seeming to break herself from thought.  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter what I’m called.”

Astra noticed that she hadn’t put away the flaming sword.  “So, you’re here to kill me.”

She nodded, and Astra saw the same deadly purpose in her eyes that she’d once had herself.  

“I’m not going to make it easy,” she warned.

Alex lowered her stance to a crouch, holding her celestial blade before her.  “I didn’t come here looking for easy.  I’m a soldier of the Almighty, and I’m here to do my job.”  And she dove toward Astra, blade first.

Astra sighed to herself.  This Alex was beautiful, and full of fire.  It was going to be a shame to have to kill her.

Astra deflected Alex and her blade to the side and sent her shooting out over the side of the cliff, where she tumbled out over the water.  Astra alighted into the sky and pursued, her own sword bursting into flames as she approached the light angel, preparing to disarm her.

But she was quick, this Alex, and her short, dark hair fell into her eyes a little as she darted around Astra and denied her the chance to flip the blade from her hands.  She raised her celestial bronze and their weapons clashed in midair as they hung suspended, light and dark, in the air over the ocean.  Each time their fiery swords struck one another, they rang like church bells and issued a storm of sparks into the night.

“What sort of angel are you, exactly?” Astra demanded.  Her sword rang against Alex’s as she tried to make her back off.

“The acting Angel of the Stars,” Alex shot back, somersaulting backwards into the clouds and preparing to dive at Astra again, to overwhelm her with force.

“Acting?” Astra laughed fiercely, and she shrugged her wings back and began winging her way upwards to meet Alex and reduce the force of her impact by half.

They thundered head-on into one another and their swords struck and sent heat and fire into the clouds, searing them with a smell of ozone.  Astra knew that if there were sailors about, they would be battening down their hatches for a storm.

“Yes, acting!” Alex answered, and locked their swords together.  “I can’t assume the position officially until I’ve killed you.”

Astra laughed.  “He’s ever the bureaucrat, isn’t he!”  And while their swords were locked, she hurled a fist forward into Alex’s shoulder, and sent her tumbling away into the velvet-black horizon.   She watched the angel’s blazing white light grow smaller as it shot away, and she smiled at the ache in her fist.  And then, she pursued.

  
  


*******

  
  


Their swords had tumbled away from them, into the Pacific Ocean.  Astra had the angel pinned on her back in the snows atop Mount Fuji, her white wings spread out in the cold, sparkling snow.  Astra sat astride her and rained blows with her fists, but Alex blocked with her bracers, evaded, writhed underneath her and threw her balance off.  Astra tumbled off the side of the mountain.  Alex flew out to meet her, and punched her square in the jaw.  Astra had not been hit that way in a very long time.  It hurt.  But it was also pleasurable to feel something deeply again, in her body and her bones, because that didn’t happen often anymore.  Even if it was pain.

As she tumbled away into the whistling wind, over the lakes and groves of cherry blossoms, Astra called out to her, “Do you even know what the job is?”

  
  


********

  
  


Alex pursued.  They grappled in the pale, shifting sands of the Gobi desert, hundreds of miles from anywhere.  Alex grabbed Astra by the wing and hurled her from the dunes out into the vastness of the basin, where she rolled over and over to a stop.  Alex came upon her a moment later, and Astra flung herself into Alex’s arms so hard that she sent the two of them rocketing upwards into the sky and they landed on the Mongolian Steppes, leaving a crater geologists would have a hell of a time trying to explain later.

After that impact, they lay for a few moments, exhausted, surrounded by dirt and detritus, staring up into the pale Mongolian sky streaked with clouds, their hearts pounding and their chests heaving with coughs.  “That was unpleasant,” Alex decided after a moment.

She picked up her head and looked over at Astra, who was flat on her back a few feet away.  Astra was spent, and everything hurt, and she had scratches and bruises all over her from Alex’s celestial sword and, perhaps more significantly, her celestial fists.

“It was,” Astra agreed.  Her fingers found some green grass beside her outstretched arm.  “You can’t defeat me, you know.”

“Well,” Alex panted, “you can’t defeat me, either.”

They looked at each other.  Alex was none the better for their fighting, just as dirty and beat-up as Astra felt.  Even her wings, which had been pure white at the start, were filthy with sand and salt and even a little blood, though whose, Astra wasn’t sure.

“You have to try, though, don’t you.”

Alex nodded.  

“Well,” Astra sighed after a moment of looking around to the limited extent she could do from flat on her back, “I’m pretty sure there’s a river over there, where we can clean ourselves up, and that patch of tall grass over there looks very soft, so, let’s bathe, and rest, and then we’ll figure out what to do.”

Alex nodded.  She didn’t have a better idea, and looked as tired of fighting as Astra was.

Astra slowly got up, stretched her neck, shook out her black, feathered wings.  Alex was looking up at her, how those wings spread open against the sky.  Astra knew she was beautiful, but she had forgotten it.  The last time anyone had beheld her with her wings unfurled, it had been fourteenth century France and they had run away screaming.  She looked away from Alex’s gaze, suddenly feeling exposed.

She offered Alex a hand, and they trudged slowly to the river, and wordlessly stripped, Alex from her celestial bronze armor, Astra from her Air Force blues.  Astra lay back in the cool of the river, floating on its surface with her black wings spread across the water on either side of her.  She watched Alex’s silhouette, standing chest-deep in the slowly running current, cupping the water in her hands and washing her face, and then her arms and torso.  Alex pulled her wings tightly around her body then, and sank beneath the water.  Astra watched as a moment later, she re-emerged in a little spray of water and light as she extended her wings once more and shook them out, sending fine, glistening droplets everywhere.

Astra noticed a few broken white primary feathers in Alex’s wings, so she gently tugged them free so that new, whole ones could grow in their place.  Alex quietly thanked her.

A little while later, Alex cupped her hands and ran cool water down Astra’s back, between her wings, cleaning where Astra could not reach.  Astra could not recall when she had last been touched so softly.

They fell asleep, still naked, a few feet from each other, in the tall, green grass.

Astra awoke with a knife to her throat.  It wasn’t the first time, but it was the first time it was a knife that could actually kill her.  So Alex had got the drop on her after all.  Well, perhaps it was her time.

So she looked up into her face, and decided that if it was indeed her time, that she could think of worse things to be looking upon than the face of this beautiful angel, with her fierce, dark eyes, her pale skin, and her white wings spread majestically behind her, bathing them in light.

But Alex’s face looked troubled.  “It was your pride that undid you.  You couldn’t resist still talking to the stars,” she said, but there wasn’t much conviction in her voice.

Astra smiled sadly.  “You think it was pride?  I have been here for a few thousand years.  The stars are the only ones who know me as I truly am.”

Alex’s face darkened further, although she didn’t remove the knife.  

“It was loneliness that kept me talking to them, Alex, Acting Angel of the Stars.”

“What did you mean when you said I didn't know what the job was?”

“Take the knife from my throat and I’ll tell you.”

After a pause, Alex put the knife aside. 

“The universe is a symphony,” Astra said, “and it is also a garden that you tend.  Every field of gravity of every black hole at the heart of every galaxy crosses paths with a thousand million filaments of light that lead back to this Earth, and the Father’s creation.  It is no small thing to keep its many parts in harmony, to nurture suns in the star nurseries and crush black holes into space, to keep the parts moving as they were willed.”

Alex listened, her brow furrowed in concentration as Astra spoke.

“I formed the landmasses, with the father’s help.  And the moon, and thus the tides of the seas.”

Something occurred to Alex.  “Did you kill the dinosaurs?” she asked, suddenly seeming eager.

Astra nodded.  “I did.  With a giant meteor.  It was not as much fun as it sounds.”

Alex seemed disappointed.

“It is forming the destiny of Earth, and protecting it, the fragile little thing that it is, within the vastness of the cosmos as the Father has designed it.  Sending the streams of atoms of gold and carbon and hydrogen to them, so that his stardust children can be formed and then…”   Astra grew sad.  “...it is just knowing the songs of the stars and the galaxies, helping them to remember that they are beautiful, because no-one else tells them.”

Alex lay down, then, on her back beside Astra, gazing up into the blue.  They talked through the day, and into the night, and into the sunrise again.  Astra shared everything she knew with her about what it meant to be the Angel of the Stars;  the movements of the the stars, the planets, the solar systems and galaxies that passed through one another, the dances of the black holes, the comets, the songs of the meteor showers that whined against the atmosphere.  She talked of the many delicate connections all these things had to humanity’s fate, and Earth’s fate, and maintaining the glorious, fragile balance of the cosmos, and taught her to listen for the beating of the planet’s heart, and the hearts of all the planets, near and far.  By the second morning, Astra had taught her the language of the stars, and their songs, and she knew that she was likely training her replacement, but she no longer cared.  Alex’s mind was beautiful and sharp, sharper even than her her sword had been, and Astra found a pleasure in feeding it that was difficult to describe.

In the midst of that second night, in the middle of Astra explaining to her the divine mathematics of seducing a sun into letting itself die, Alex suddenly asked, “Why did you try to overthrow the Father, if you love and trust the art and science of his creation?”

Astra gave a long sigh.  She didn’t like to think about those things.  But she supposed she had no choice now, as she lay in the tall grass with an angel sent to kill her.  “It wasn’t because I wanted the Throne.  Or because I wanted Lucifer to have the Throne.”

“Why then?” Alex pressed, and her eyes searched Astra’s, trying to understand.

Astra gave a long sigh.  “Because I wanted the Father’s attention.  I resented that he had made us so perfect, so powerful, and yet loved the humans more.  I wanted his love, and in the absence of it, I would settle for his anger.”  She smiled ruefully.  “On reflection, it was not a well thought out plan.”

And Alex’s face was filled with grief at this, but she said nothing.  

Astra wondered what her other forms looked like, if they were as beautiful as this.  She suspected so.  “Don’t you want more love than what he gives you?” Astra asked her.

Alex shook her head, and the stars reflected in her dark irises.  “I’m sorry, I interrupted you.  Tell me, how do you seduce a sun into dying?”

So Astra explained, the calculus required, and the music that corresponded to it, the songs needed to make the dying star feel ready to let go and supernova, seeding the skies with new stars.  She told Alex of the beauty of a supernova, how its song echoed back over light years, and how the way it reverberated in her chest was one of her favorite feelings.  “You will love it too, I think, when you get the chance to feel it.”

But in that second morning, as the sky grew pale and the stars burned out, Alex looked at her with tears in her eyes.  She took Astra’s hand, and said, “I didn’t know.  I didn’t know what the job was.”

Astra squeezed her hand.  “You can do the job.  Your mind is as formidable as your sword arm.”

“I know I can do the job.  That’s not the problem.”

Astra took her other hand.  “What, then?”

“Your light is too beautiful to be snuffed out.  You belong to the stars.”  And then she began to weep.  “And I belong to you.”

And Astra took Alex in her arms and drew her close, and her heart soared in ways that she, with her mighty wings, had never done.

  
  
  


**************************

  
  
  


Alex had fallen in love with her.  Astra had not expected that.

But Astra had been so lonely for so long, and this angel tumbled into her life, full of fire and light and fury, and they had wrestled one another across mountains and streams, and she had made her  _ feel _ , oh Father, she had made Astra feel so much more than she had felt in millennia.  So what could she do, but wrap this angel of light in her wings, and hold her, and glory in it?

Just like the stars, Astra had no-one to tell her she was beautiful.  Until now.

Alex still swore she had to kill her.  But Astra knew now that she wouldn’t.  After a week, Alex abandoned the idea that she wanted to do the job, at least the way the Father wanted her to.  She and Astra would fly together over the oceans and perch on snowy mountaintops and wade among the waves on deserted beaches in the middle of nowhere, their wings unfurled and their eyes smiling.  They would spar in vast empty deserts where the ring of their heavenly swords (once they recovered them from the bottom of the Pacific) was clear and bright.  They would wash each other’s feet in streams in the forests, groom each other’s wings, lay their cheeks against each other’s chests and listen to each other’s hearts.  They would lie together at nights and talk to the stars, and tell them they were beautiful.  They would sing to them.  But really, they were singing to each other.

“So, will you go back to Heaven and tell the Father you have failed?” Astra asked one night as they sat perched atop the giant white globe of the Keck Observatory in the warm Mauna Kea night.  Alex’s head rested on Astra’s shoulder, and Astra felt deeply at peace for the first time in a long time.  Weeks had passed and she had not pressed Alex as to her plans.  She was simply enjoying the fact that she had someone with whom she could be whole, someone to sing to the stars with.  Even if it would have to end soon.

Alex didn’t answer for a long while.  She sat staring out at Venus in the west, humming a little song to its light.  Finally, she picked up her head and turned to Astra and said, “I can’t go back.  I can’t.  I can sing to the stars without being his servant.  I’m staying here with you.”

And Astra lifted her into her arms and they soared into the sky together.  “Do you love me?” she asked, when they had risen up into the cool, damp clouds.

Alex kissed her first on the lips, then her cheeks, and then on her closed eyelids.  “More than my heart can hold.”

  
  


*****************

  
  


So Alex stayed, and they were happy.  Astra no longer went into war.  Walking among the humans had always been unsatisfying; it was better than being alone but she could never get close to anyone.  But now Alex was with her, and they could spend eternity together.  They could laugh and tell stories and spar and spend hours lying together on mountainsides and in the protective hollows of valleys, placing kisses on each other’s stomachs, worshipping the perfection of each other’s marble-carved forms, gazing into each other’s eyes and lavishing praise and song on each other’s smiles.  They soared together, fingers loosely tangled, over the nodding golden grasses of the plains.  They held each other tightly, high among the cold damp of the clouds, and whisper the poetry of the stars and the planets to each other.

Sometimes they ventured into cities and villages, to take in their lights, their music, their food and drink.  But they always went home together, and fell asleep wrapped in each other’s wings, the harmony of their light and dark feathers shielding and warming them.

Sometimes they saw lovers walking together, and they were indistinguishable from the two angelic lovers in most respects; they leaned on another, or held hands, and whispered gentle things to each other, and laughed close to one another.  But since they were human, there were two things that they were able to do that Alex and Astra couldn’t:  they could get drunk, and they could fuck.

Drunk looked like fun sometimes, Astra thought.  Actually quite often.  Especially when humans danced, the drink gave them a kind of joyful abandon.  But she also saw them often vomiting afterwards, and knew that too much caused this and headaches and other undesirable consequences.

Sex, though?  One afternoon, after a bit of chasing each other among the mountaintops of New Zealand, they confessed their curiosity about it to each other.  The humans seemed so thoroughly consumed by it, and it seemed to them that there was nothing that felt better to them, nor any means of sharing intimacy that was quite so … intense.

“You know,” Astra pointed out quietly, after a long silence, “if we cut off our wings, we’d become like them.  We could get drunk.  We could have sex.  We could just be people.”

There was something tempting in it; not being eternal anymore, having to make the most of their time because it was suddenly finite.  Living flawed, small, soft, human lives that would end.  Knowing those pleasures of the frail flesh, drunkenness and sex.  

Alex looked at Astra, trailed a finger over her gleaming black feathers.  “No,” she sighed.  “Your wings are too beautiful.  I would have those things if I could taste them for just a moment, but there’s nothing that I want more than to look at you, exactly as you are, for the rest of eternity.”

Astra gazed a long time at Alex.  She could hardly picture her without wings: their benevolent light, the way their smaller, downier feathers fluttered in the breeze, the strong lines of their blazing-white primaries radiating proud and powerful from her shoulders.  

So they remained angels, beautiful and powerful.  They sang to the stars, and talked with the tides, and caressed the moons and the galaxies with their words.  And they held each other, kissed each other to sleep with soft, peaceful kisses upon their lips, and cheeks, and closed eyes, and slept naked under the night skies, wrapped in each other’s wings; perfect, eternal, pure.

  
  



End file.
